Recently I told you, how difficult it is to make one of these large scale portraits and that the faces always look like monsters at the beginning.

This some of the stages of creation.

: :

Luke Wilson wrote a text about London for my book “PLAKATIEF – A World in LAyers”, that was published by Kerber Verlag in 2011 and nominated for the “Deutscher Fotobuch Preis 2012” (German photo book awards).

London
By Luke Wilson

Images. For a city so full of images, scents, and sounds, the incessant activity and crowded sidewalks of London leave little time to notice what is around us every day. We hasten through the streets, destinations clear, our heads down and our thoughts busy with a time and place beyond the present. Ever-changing images and colors leap at us from walls and buses, from half-opened doors and half-glimpsed faces. We are blind to the aromas, the musical harmonies, the stories that surround us with every step. We are anesthetized to London’s vibrancy. We rarely allow ourselves to notice the beauty in the forgotten and faded images that surround these city streets—new stories that are woven from detritus of the old and the disintegrating.

Pages, advertisements, and posters are left plastered, torn, and ripped all over London. The fragmented state of these images creates the illusion of insignificance and causes our eyes to simply overlook their true value. Senseless, mindless—we are convinced we can learn nothing. But when we can take the time, when we take that breath and really look, the images provide something new; we can see these cultural ruins as insightful works of art.

Created unwittingly and arbitrarily by the unknown and the unseen—recast and framed by the artist’s lens—these images have new life and can, perhaps, help the oblivious masses rejoice in the beauty of decay and rebirth.